Author: oliver sudden
Date: 2023-07-16 11:23
This thread has been sleeping peacefully for a while but I happened upon it while googling schöni ottensteiner and there's another topic in it close to my heart so I will reply on the off chance anyone who's interested in it is still reading!
I play in a new music ensemble and don't get many chances to play the Messiaen because it's, well, too old. As Thomas Carroll mentioned, what Henri Akoka used is fairly specifically documented, so the last time the Messiaen came up I thought I would see how close I could get. Clarinets Direct had a nice selection of Couesnons at the time, including one with about the right specifications, although no mouthpiece. But a google of the mouthpiece turned up a specimen in decent condition for the princely sum of €40, so it seemed worth a shot.
The sound isn't big in decibel terms but it's incredibly zingy, so there is an enormous overtone spectrum to play with. That was more or less what I was expecting (and hoping for), of course. What I didn't expect was to what extent the overtones made up for the lack of pure decibels: I've usually had to work pretty hard with the low fanfares in the sixth movement but this time they cut through very gratifyingly. I was prepared for the possibility of it not making much sense to mix the older instrument with what my colleagues were using but in the end it worked very nicely.
I repeated the experiment a couple of years ago with the Boulez and Lachenmann solos and a 1960ish R13. No ensemble to balance with this time of course but again the overtone spectrum was very useful. In particular, since the tone varies so much more with dynamic than on more recent instruments, the serial structure of the Boulez was much easier to bring out: a dynamic can have a particular tonal association rather than just being louder or softer.
Likewise for the Histoire du Soldat trio but there's a bit less to report there...
Was the different palette useful? Absolutely. Could I have done these things on my Festivals? Probably, especially if I messed around with mouthpieces and reeds a bit, although the Couesnon instrument only cost about as much as three mainstream mouthpieces anyway. Would I have known to look for these sounds if I hadn't tried to ask the old instruments what they wanted to do? Probably not, certainly not in every detail, and the idea of aiming for a particular model gave a much more stable basis than just messing around with hardware.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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